alum profile Bravo, Andy! Happily ensconced at pop culture’s epicenter, Andy Cohen produces some of television’s most-watched programs

Andy Cohen is unapologetic about addicting large numbers of his fellow Americans to dishy television shows about wealthy housewives, junior fashion designers competing for the icy approval of a supermodel, and an obsessive, stylish gay man who makes big drama and big money flipping real estate. Cohen (COM’90) is the senior vice president of original programming and development at Bravo, overseeing production on about thirty unscripted series, including some of the most popular shows on TV. In addition to developing new projects, he supervises casting, character motivation, episode structuring, and getting the “tonal” elements right, he says — “eliminating things that don’t fit in with our voice and finding things that strike me as funny that we should blow out and make funnier.” His sensibility — campy, sincere, voyeuristic, hip — infuses Bravo’s programming and shapes shows like The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Project Runway, and Flipping Out, all of which have become pop- cultural touchstones, cultish spectacles that seem at once Bravo’s Andy Cohen is a force lowbrow and chic. behind the cameras — and, On some nights, Bravo is the top-rated cable channel, increasingly, in front of them, too. outperforming the networks in the advertising-critical krause adam eighteen-to-forty-nine demographic. A megahit like Project Runway routinely draws between two million and four both online and on the air, where Cohen’s infectious, million viewers. telegenic enthusiasm makes him an ideal host for cast Bravo’s audience, according to Cohen, is the envy of the reunion shows and episode recaps. “It was a great, fortuitous industry: affluent and educated, passionate, and a little thing,” he says of his trajectory at Bravo. “At BU I always fanatical. “They like watching the creative process,” he says. wanted to be on air, but I got a great job out of school “On shows like Top Chef and Top Design, they like knowing producing at CBS News. It was too good for me to leave New why people made something the way they did, and they want York and go to some small town to try to be on air.” to know how they made it. So we need to satisfy that. But As a kid, Cohen watched tons of TV, he says, and he was they also love the drama. And they have a certain sense of one of the first students at BU to own a VCR. Ask him for humor that we speak to.” his all-time favorite show and he lists five: The Mary Tyler The programming — competition shows like Top Chef or Moore Show, Donny and Marie, All My Children (“but it has docudramas like The Real Housewives series — has other key to be in the eighties”), Oprah, and the Australian version of reality-TV ingredients: great storytelling, outsize characters, Kath and Kim. (According to a recent Cohen blog post, that talent, and something aspirational, Cohen says. “People comedy is currently “getting mauled” by Bravo’s parent, will start out watching a show like The Real Housewives and NBC, which is airing an American version.) think, oh, this is going to be a train wreck. But then they start And when he hears people complain that reality TV realizing that they identify with some of these women. They represents the end of good taste or the fall of civilization? get satisfaction and humor out of it, and it’s exciting and fun “I get offended,” Cohen says. “The first reality show was An and highly addictive.” American Family on PBS. It was a fascinating look at how So is Cohen’s blog on bravotv.com; like the shows, it’s an this family lived their lives at a certain time in history. Real ode to fabulousness and big-city style without any sense of World on MTV picked that up — it really changed the way elitism. He writes it on his BlackBerry in the cab he takes the people in my generation viewed gay people, social issues, from his West Village apartment to his office in Rockefeller AIDS, alcoholism. I respect reality TV. I think when it’s done Plaza every morning, often sharing his assessment of the right — and I think we do it right, Survivor does it right, The ride, the fare, and the driver — a Twitter-sized reality show Amazing Race — it reflects the culture around us. of his own. “Truth is stranger than fiction,” he says “And it’s so much The blog’s popularity led to gigs in front of the camera, fun to watch.” Bari Walsh

Winter 2008–2009 BOSTONIA 59